"What it must look and smell like when a movie brain vomits. Truly worthless."
-Variety

Sunday, September 06, 2015

Next series: Looney Tunes Golden Collection

People always ask fans of a certain collection of things what their one favourite is, in rather mean attempts to control the conversation. If you were stranded on a desert island, and you could only have one movie studio with you, that kind of thing. Which one to pick? Well, I'd probably pick the Hal Roach Studios. That one's got a pretty good collection: Laurel and Hardy, Little Rascals,... Taxi Boys. On the other hand, MGM would be interesting to study in-depth. Also, because it's a finite collection now. We of course have the Thalberg 1930s, and the modus operandi of its brash chief, Louis B. Mayer. Our every film will be the classiest, gold-plated masterpiece since The Birth of a Nation. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. How could the biggest, most lavish movie studio in the world end up in bed with the likes of Dino De Laurentiis, and making such putrid anti-classics like Death Wish 2? I know, I know, but what about the James Bond series? What about the recent Hobbit trilogy? Of course, James Bond is a co-production with MGM AND Columbia/Sony, and the Hobbit trilogy was MGM, New Line Cinema and Warner Bros. proper.
Which brings me to my reason for Warner Bros. There's numberous... numerous reasons, of course: their association with Kubrick, with Joe Dante and Richard Donner, what have you, but I think mostly because of their Looney Tunes. They don't seem to be on television much anymore, let alone on Cartoon Network or Boomerang... I don't think we even get Boomerang anymore. But fortunately, I do have the five volumes of their DVD collection, the Looney Tunes Golden Collection. And if I ever get my student loans paid off, I just might get that sixth one... the seventh is apparently going to be all of the terrible, terrible ones that Arthur Davis directed, so I'll just skip that one. They're unfit for viewing by more than one person at a time. Anyway! Let's just... dive right into it. The very first one is, of course, Baseball Bugs.